A Parallel World?

 When I was young, it was 'common knowledge' that the largest city in the world was Tokyo. Notwithstanding the slightly chagrinned feeling I had back then that the title surely ought to go to London, it seemed appropriate that the rivals should be so far from each other, on islands on opposite sides of the world. Later on, I learnt from Alan Macfarlane's magisterial The Savage Wars of Peace that the correspondences [if not similarities] between the two cultures were greater than one might have imagined. But apart from that I haven't studied Japan much, and it still seems a very remote place, although like all of us my life has been transformed by Japanese technology and industrial design.

So an invitation to the V&A's refurbished Toshiba Gallery when it repoened was very welcome. Toshiba were the V&A's first corporate sponsors, and the gallery first opened in 1986, as investment in Britain by Toshiba and other Japanese companies was reshaping our industrial landscape. It drew on the V&A's remarkable collection of Japanese art, assembled from 1852 onwards, just as Japan was opening up to Western countries after nearly three centuries of seclusion. This rejuvenation of the gallery isn't a huge upheaval; the aim was mainly to improve the lighting and to provide space for more contemporary art. This was done by editing displays - like the porcelain - which overlap with other galleries in the Museum.

So you'll find some familiar objects, like this spectacular 19th century suit of armour, which is one of the highlights of a display at the front of the gallery about the Samurai warrior tradition. The display also includes the weaponry the samurai carried. The swords are especially impressive. The gleaming, murderous blades - Japanese steel was once the best in the world - still glitter with danger. An entertaining video, derived from a historic Japanese illustrated manual, demonstrates the very many stages it required to put on a suit of armour like this.

It's echoed across the gallery by another video in which a model demonstrates the nearly as complex task of putting on a kimono like the one on the right [1800-1840] and tying the sash on properly. Again, incredible attention to detail, which matches the superb workmanship of the stunning kimonos on display.

The Samurai have been compared with knights and this display made me feel somehow that I was in a familiar world. How different, I wondered, was this from the world of Sutton Hoo with its pattern-welded swords and decorated armour? Beautiful displays about religion and the tea-ceremony, theatre and the 'Floating World' of pleasure, with its celebrated courtesans had the same effect - some of the prints even seemed to have the same satirical intent as their eighteenth-century counterparts in London. At a time when London and Edo were - probably unknown to each other - indeed vying to be the largest cities on the planet [and according to Macfarlane for many of the same reasons], they seemed to be doing many of the same things.And yet this was without doubt a very different society, with its own characteristic astringently elegant aesthetic.

Sooner or later these two cultures world meet. From the 16th century First Portuguese and then Dutch sailors arrived in Japan and the display demonstrates the interaction that followed. The gallery's perhaps most famous exhibit, the Mazarin Casket [1640-1643] demonstrates the appetite for Japanese goods in the West, even if the recipients can have had little idea of the meaning of the scenes from Japanese and Chinese literature with which it is illustrated. Even though foreigners were confined to a particular island off Nagasaki, to stop them disrupting Japanese society, the Japanese were keen too on Western innovations. There's a spectacular Dutch naval sword - or 'hanger' - decorated in Japanese style for a Samurai warrior, and a delightful print of the scene inside a 'Foreign Goods shop' in which we can see two Japanese gentlemen with a static electricity globe.

After 1852, when the American Commodore Perry forced the Japanese government to open up to foreigners, this parallel world rapidly adapted to the new situation, capitalizing on Japan's traditional craft skills to make exports for the European market in European style [like the figurine on the right] to pay for the modernization which made Japan a first-rank power by the end of the First World War.

The English responded with the Mikado and collections like this one. The swirl of cultural influence grew ever stronger, despite the second world war. Look at the delightful kimono , woven to celebrate the first flight between Tokyo and London in the 1930s, which has all the excitement of the contemporary Daily Mail.

At the same time, as the exhibition shows. that modernity prompted a new awareness of Japanese folk culture. For despite their facility for adapting exotic cultural forms [they'd been doing it to Chinese culture for millennia], as this exhibition shows they've never been submerged by them, And as the Heel-less Shoes  by Noritako Tatehana [2014] demonstrate by referencing the impossibly high heels of Edo courtesans, they do it with style and humour.

And the craze for 'cute' [kawaii - see below] once a fad among young girls, but now self-consciously [or unconsciously] seeping through the culture, shows how slyly, entertainingly creative this parallel universe can be.

This outfit, Sweet Lolita ensemble by the brand Baby, The Stars Shine Bright, uses a dress with clock, tea-party and playing card motifs to reference Alice in Wonderland. What should we think?  This exhibition is a wonderful introduction to a parallel universe indeed.

Into the Celtic Mists

Today I visited the The Celts: Art and Identity exhibition at the British Museum. It was a stunning experience. It includes a large number of world-famous objects, which people in this country are unlikely to encounter unless they make a special effort. Secondly it is a fantastic tribute to the power and longevity of an art-style, 'Celtic Art', which is recognized across the globe, and has lasted in public taste, more or less as long as 'Classical Art'. It is this art-style more than anything else which, for this exhibition at least, defines what it is to be Celtic. The almost abstract [they sometimes conceal animal images] curvilinear designs which characterize it began in Northern France around 350BC spread across Europe and lasted into the Middle Ages and beyond, a history of more than two thousand years. Here are those seductive curves on the Battersea Shield, thrown into the Thames during the Iron Age in the later part of the 1st Millennium BC...

And here they are in the Lindisfarne Gospel from Northumbria more than a thousand years later!

What is really touching is the power of memory involved here, the allegiance to - or the revival of -  motifs which say 'This is Us' across centuries - despite the interventions of Romans and Saxons, not to mention Jutes or Huns or Scythians.

The exhibition is scrupulous in its insistence that although art expresses identity, this need not be what we call ethnic or national identity or even linguistic identity. As the curators point out, when we first hear about Celts [from the Greeks, around 500BC] they are living in Central Europe; while no-one referred to the peoples of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany as Celts until the 18th century. Let's face it, the idea of the Celts as a continent-wide 'community' of some kind is an invention of modern nationalism [usually benign, sometimes not] either in reaction to some 'other' people: in these islands, the English/Saesneig/Sassenachs, in France [Gaul], Germans and Romans; or even, not so long ago of EU enthusiasm [the Celts were 'the first Europeans'].

The curators are surely right; the kind of approach taken by Neil Oliver and the BBC in their recent series is crass and unhistorical. But I wonder if the curators haven't gone too far. There is very little mention of linguistics in the exhibition. Yet the evidence is clear. Personal and place-names in early sources show that people from Britain and Ireland, Gaul and as far as Northern Italy and Austria spoke one of two variants of a common Indo-European language group, which we call Celtic today, separate from Italic [Latin], Hellenic [Greek], Germanic, Baltic or Slavic. Even if they didn't feel themselves to be part of one big Celtic community, I suspect that had we been around to see it we would have noticed that the language went in parallel with some [not all] cultural characteristics. And from Caesar and Tacitus we know that these weren't shared with people to the North and East - whom they described as German.

So I think the exhibition could have grasped these issues more boldly. Especially as it looks as though as Roman power pushed into Northern Europe, 'Celtic' people did began to develop a stronger sense of identity, as we see with Vercingetorix's career and Tacitus's speech for the Caledonian Calgacus: "They have made a desert and they call it peace". The later part of the exhibition demonstrates this self-awareness well in the giant arm-rings and different clothes worn by people outside the empire. Perhaps that process explains why in the post-Roman period Irish monks began to emphasize Iron Age motifs in their manuscripts. 

The curators are a bit timid in other respects. Many of the classical sources only describe the  Celts because of their unwelcome arrival, mob-handed and greedy, in fleshpots of the Mediterranean like Delphi or Rome. On the evidence of this exhibition - fabulous statues, gorgeous weaponry - warriors were the people who ran these societies, just as the Greeks and Romans said. And everything else we know from the written sources indicates that Celtic societies were competitive and unstable. But the curators seem unwilling really to contemplate the implications of this. These warriors were probably as disruptive and difficult as mediaeval knights. Sadly we lack the evidence for the ideology and practices which might have mitigated the mayhem. But that doesn't mean we should necessarily disbelieve the classical sources which tell us of barbaric violence, human sacrifice etc On the whole this is a sanitized Celtic world, where violence is a police issue, no more. I'm not convinced.

There's a knock-on effect of this, which is that we don't really get any understanding of why when they did emerge into history, Celts were to be found battering at the walls of Greece and Rome. Mary Beard has talked about how the Roman empire faced problems with barbarian 'economc migrants' in the 4th century. There's no reason to think that the Celts/Gauls who threatened Rome and Greece were any different; in fact, following Peter Heather, they were probably the first examples of a process which would eventually sink the Roman Empire in the West. 

With religion, archaeologists are always at a stand. And here the curators stay strictly on message, talking blandly of gods and legends which have been lost. And yet the two most spectacular exhibits are religious. The first is the almost incredible assemblage of the Snettisham hoards, buried - as a sacrifice or oblation? - in Norfolk around 70 BC. 

These exhibits are fantastic, beautiful, mesmerizing, and very, very strange. Earlier in the exhibition we have been shown beautiful 'torcs' from all over the Celtic world, identified as status symbols. Now we find them deposited as part of 12 separate 'hoards' with almost no context, apart from an impressive 'enclosure' nearby which unfortunately dates from several decades later.The wealth implied by these things is spectacular [what about the stuff they didn't sacrifice?]; the craftsmanship superb. But why? Irrationality on this scale must imply religion but as far as the exhibition is concerned that's as far as one can go.

At the heart of this glorious exhibition is what is without doubt a religious object, the amazing Gundestrup Cauldron. Made of solid silver it was discovered in a bog in Denmark and dated to around 100 BC, it is usually described one of the 'masterpieces' of 'Celtic Art'. Yet as the exhibition makes clear it is not really 'Celtic' at all, although people we might call Celts seem to appear on it. It was probably made in Thrace [Romania/Bulgaria] and on the inside there are scenes which seem to derive from India, including a depiction of the goddess Lakshmi, and a shaman sitting in a forest doing what looks like tantric yoga. Some years ago I made a film about all this and you can see it here: it's part of a series called Down to Earth [Channel 4 1991], is presented by Catherine Hills, and features Timothy Taylor. I spoke to Tim recently and he says he stands by everything we said then.

Today I am astonished that the Danes allowed us to put their great treasure on a small electric turntable! But you need to see it in the flesh, as it were, to appreciate what an astonishing object it is; its sheer size and strangeness amazes everyone.

With the Gundestrup cauldron we are arriving into history, and the eruption of Rome into the Celtic world [rather than the other way round!]. As I said, the exhibition does a grand job of showing how traditional ideas and styles survived and were transformed in the process of 'Romanization', with the influences going both ways - and conflict being as significant as accommodation, both inside and beyond the area of Roman rule.

As you emerge from the exhibition, the last chamber celebrates the rediscovery of the Celts, Ossian, druids, eisteddfods and all. It demonstrates that the Celtic revival must be one of the most successful cultural enterprises in European history, although not one without problems, as we have seen in Ireland in the past decades. In a way the revival is the reason that this exhibition exists at all, despite the curators' attempts to avoid its influence. So if you decide, as I often do, to walk back through the exhibition to look again at things you now understand better, it's actually a rather wonderful way to see it, moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, backwards in time until certainties dissolve in the Celtic mist.

Sailing to Ithaca

Not long ago I sailed with friends on the ferry across the sea from Sami on Cephalonia to Ithaka, home of Odysseus and Penelope. I was in Cephalonia to celebrate a wedding, and with Ithaka just across the channel a visit to the site of such an epic marriage was clearly mandatory. But the archaeologists were not encouraging. There is no palace like those at Mycenae or Pylos, I'd read. And when I consulted a friend about the palace referred to here, the response wasn't hopeful: "As you may surmise, the whole Homeric question is both sensitive locally and has given rise to work which one might politely describe as eccentric...   the Agios Athanasios site is actually Hellenistic."

Even so, what would we find when we got there? Perhaps the journey's the thing. Here's Cavafy's famous poem...

"Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich."

However long it takes, you have to get up early. During the week there's only one boat a day from Sami, which leaves first thing. But that has its compensations, as dawn by the sea in Greece  is always a stunning experience,

So we arrived on the quay and drove our car onto a rugged-looking ferry along with some tourist buses, backpackers, and delivery vans. As the ship sailed the morning mist still engulfed the island as the sun heated up the hillsides.

The crossing took about an hour and we landed at a jetty by a beach which seemed made for hauling antique galleys from the water.

The round wound up the mountainside towards Vathy [= Deep] the main town, which lies at the end of a long bay.

And naturally there's a statue of Homer in the main Square.

But not many signs of epic action - at least, not here. So we set off in search of some, following a skimpy guidebook along the stunning cliff road towards the other big town, called Stavros. There we found a small but delightful museum with some Bronze Age pottery and some fine archaic metalwork which had been deposited in what we can imagine was Homer's Cave of the Nymphs, which is in the bay below Stavros.

Excitingly there was a map too which mentioned Agios Athanasios:

And better still there was someone to tell us how to get there!

So off we drove with the kind lady's instructions, and eventually we found a sign to the 'School of Homer', struck hopefully off the road and eventually found it. Still there was a walk uphill  to the site through scented olive groves...

Eventually we found some ruins which had been incorporated into more recent farm buildings:

Most of the archaeology had been covered up for protection, but it was possible to peek in and look at the trenches.

Nothing looked very Mycenaean, [I still don't know why it is called Homer's School], but even so the ruins were both impressive and evocative.

Standing here by the Hellenistic tower and looking down to the shore, it was perfectly easy to imagine it might have been Odysseus's palace as the excited blogs claim. And safe up on the mountain, the turbulent world down at sea-level, the yachts and ferries by the harbour, and beyond them Athens and the financial crisis, seemed centuries away. Imagine Tennyson's Ulysses/Odysseus, getting bored with routine Kingship up here in the hills...

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas...

Come, my friends,

Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

But then, to be honest it's very unlikely his palace was here. Mycenaean palaces tend to be close to the plains, where the wealth came from, as at Mycenae itself, Athens, and the one near Sparta recently announced by the Greek Ministry of Culture [Google translates quite well!]. But there was something up here I think that does link to his time:

 
Just below the 'palace' or 'school' we found an ancient cistern with a pool of water in the bottom.

With its corbelled roof,the work seemed 'cyclopean' like the passage to the well at Mycenae:

I was delighted! Even though it didn't actually bring Odysseus [if he existed at all in the real world] any closer. But unless we have this kind of imaginative response, I don't think there's much point wondering about the past anyway. We need to imagine it to understand it properly. The important thing is not to let the dream defy the evidence.

This was a wonderful expedition. My thanks to my fellow explorers. We were all much the better for it,

Here's Cavafy again...

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

.

A bit of recent history

As I live in Islington, I was intrigued to see Carole Cadwalladr's recent article about the borough in the Observer. Amazing that an Islington resident can write a long article about her home borough without mentioning the fact that for ten years - 2000-2010 - it was run by the Liberal Democrats! They took over largely because the former Labour administration run by Margaret Hodge was so inefficient and hobbled by its public-sector union connections, that the voters threw them out, even while New Labour was triumphant. So much so that, apparently, when the new Lib-Dem leadership came in, their first action was to make it a sackable offence for council officers not to answer the phone when members of the public called. Jeremy Corbyn was an intimate member of the Red Islington gang. I don't know if he has responded to his colleague John Mann's open letter about the 1980s/90s Islington Child abuse scandal but that's all part of the same issue. Today the council is in far better shape, largely because of its decade of freedom from Labour control, but now with only one beleaguered Green opposition councillor there are signs of the same impenetrable cabals taking control and true accountability seeping away. As ever  "All power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely."

1014 - or the long prehistory of Magna Carta

This year with many books and exhibitions  we remember the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta. 

That’s terrific, but however important the events of 1215  turned out to be, don’t imagine that they were only, or even the first time an English king had been wrestled to the conference table by his subjects.

We should perhaps have been celebrating two years ago - and the anniversary would have been millennial. 1014 saw the penultimate crisis in the disastrous reign of Aethelred the ‘Unready’ [978-1016]. Here's a beautiful gold coin of his, minted in 1003-1006.

He's wearing armour, as mediaeval kings often did! Aethelred's father was the great Edgar, whose prestige dominated the British isles and glowed throughout Europe. But this ‘badly-advised’ [unraed in old English, hence ‘unready’] monarch brought his Kingdom to destruction by a mixture of willful politics and military failure. Assailed by renewed attacks from Denmark, latterly led by the Danish king Swein Forkbeard, in the winter of 1013 Aethelred lost control of the country altogether, and was forced to seek refuge with his brother-in-law Duke Richard of Normandy. As he clambered aboard the longship which took him to Rouen, Aethelred may have thought the disaster final. But suddenly, at the moment of triumph, Sweyn Forkbeard died. For the English there was a last opportunity to restore the situation and they took it. Sweyn’s Danish army and the mercenaries of the fleet were for enthroning his young son Canute, but somehow, all pulling together, the English elite resisted as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates:

‘The fleet all chose Canute for king; whereupon advised all the counsellors of England, clergy and laity, that they should send after King Aethelred; saying, that no sovereign was dearer to them than their natural lord, if he would govern them better than he did before.  Then sent the king hither his son Edward, with his messengers; who had orders to greet all his people, saying that he would be their faithful lord – would better each of those things that they disliked -- and that each of the things should be forgiven which had been either done or said against him; provided they all unanimously, without treachery, turned to him.  Then was full friendship established, in word and in deed and in compact, on either side. And every Danish king they proclaimed an outlaw for ever from England. Then came King Aethelred home, in Lent, to his own people; and he was gladly received by them all.’

Here for the first time we can see that conditions are being imposed on the king in return for the throne. The situation must have been not unlike that at Runnymede, more than two hundred years later. This was a king whose political and military failure had made him vulnerable to demands from his subjects.

What those demands were we can gather from a sermon preached at the time by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York which has become famous as the Sermon of ‘the Wolf’ to the English. It was probably given in the presence of King Aethelred and his council, and it indicates the kind of issues that were exercising them: injustice, excessive taxes and treason.

‘the rights of freemen are taken away and the rights of slaves are restricted and charitable obligations are curtailed. Free men may not keep their independence, nor go where they wish, nor deal with their property just as they desire…

Nothing has prospered now for a long time either at home or abroad, but there has been military devastation and hunger, burning and bloodshed in nearly every district time and again… And excessive taxes have afflicted us…’

 

Experts think that the wording of the Chronicle is copied from a writ or document which Aethelred issued, which would have detailed the agreement. Eleventh-century writs were letters sent by the King to his governors in the shires, often specifically to be read out in the Shire court; such writs always began with ‘The King greets his people…’ as in the Chronicle.   Usually the extent to which kings rely on the consent of the governed is concealed beneath the rhetoric of royal power. Here, it's made public. In the context of the then unusual sophistication of the English monarchy, working as it did through shire and hundred [district] assemblies, this is even more revealing. In administering the shires, the king’s officials relied, as we have seen, on the empanelment of juries, that is the participation of his subjects in their government. It seems that both at this subordinate level and at the highest reaches of politics, the English felt they had rights, that, as in the forests of Germany centuries before, sovereignty emanated, not just from above, from God, but also to some extent from below, from the people.

Constitutional encounters of this kind happened elsewhere in Europe at roughly this time, but what makes 1014 special for us is that the agreement comes at the beginning of a continuing series of such agreements which would govern the development of the English state down to our own times. Four years later, after Canute had eventually defeated Aethelred’s successor, he found himself making a similar agreement in Oxford, which he was to reiterate in two celebrated ‘Letters to the English’ in 1019 and 1027. King Edward the Confessor [the Edward in fact who crossed from Normandy to begin the negotiations in 1014] inherited this set-up, indeed was to confirm it publicly in 1065. The way he ruled was explicitly the basis of the regime of his Norman successors. That was made clear in the Charter issued by Henry I at his Coronation in 1100, which itself in turn became the basis of the restoration of order by Henry II after the ‘anarchy’ of King Stephen’s reign. Henry I’s Coronation Charter was instrumental in the negotiations before Magna Carta too. Thence, by way of Magna Carta itself, we reach Simon de Montfort, the ‘comune of England’ and the beginnings of Parliament. There was nothing inevitable about this, as there was nothing inevitable, indeed, about the survival of England as unified kingdom, but the fact remains that English constitutional history descends in a direct line, not unlike the monarchy itself, from those tense discussions in the aftermath of Danish disaster.

Welcome!

This is a new venture. So please bear with me as I learn the art - and probably craft! - of the blog. Most of this will be about historical stuff [hence the name] but I expect there will be times when I just bang on about something that interests, annoys or delights me.
A quick introduction. I'm a TV director, and I've specialized for many years in films about history and religion. You can learn more about that here, which is my TV website. There's a blog panel on there and I may be transferring some of that stuff over as time goes on. We'll see...
Meanwhile you may be wondering where my background picture is.

 It's a view of Iken on the Alde in Suffolk, taken on a visit with Sam Newton, when we were trying to get a film about the background to Beowulf going, to coincide with ITV's new drama series. More about that later, perhaps. Iken was the home of St Botolph, one of East Anglia's earliest saints. When he founded the church there in the seventh century it was probably on a island in the stream, a kind of Lindisfarne . A very beautiful place anyway, and  I love the boat at the bottom of the picture!